Top news—Faculty: Related Content
The Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences (VAAS) inducted four new fellows for 2024, including anthropologist and Bennington College faculty member Miroslava (Mirka) Prazak.
Faculty member John Umphlett's latest sculpture, Bit Death; Life; He Blows on Them and They Wither, on view at the North Bennington Outdoor Sculpture Show (NBOSS) at the Bennington Museum through November, takes the form of a cross with angled arms–and is designed, too, for Umphlett's own entombment.
Exhibition reveals the personal collections of Bennington College community members September 17–November 23.
This fall, Bennington College welcomes two new faculty members: Alex Creighton, who teaches Critical Writing, and Kaolack Ibrahima Ndiaye, who teaches Africana Dance.
Bennington College documented its observation of 2024 total solar eclipse, including a class about the eclipse with astronomy faculty member Hugh Crowl and a trip north to take students into the center of the path of totality.
On the second Monday before opening night, rehearsal for this term’s faculty production—Sweat by Lynn Nottage—started with a fight. Student actors executed a choreographed-but-believable series of punches and holds. They threw each other across the barroom set while the assistant stage manager and fight captain Tennyson Perkins ’26 took careful notes to deliver to the breathless actors at the end of the scene.
Then they did it again. And again. And again. Each time, they incorporated Perkins’s tweaks, and each time, the action was clearer and cleaner.
Five Questions with Astronomer Hugh Crowl
Hugh Crowl, astronomer and faculty member in astronomy and physics at Bennington, is teaching a class this term all about the total solar eclipse crossing nearby Bennington College on April 8. Bennington will experience a 97-percent eclipse, but the class is traveling north to Plattsburgh, NY, to be in the path of totality.
The Literature discipline at Bennington College has received a grant from the Winston Foundation to fund a new course and reading from 2024 Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Writer Jia Tolentino.
Susan Sgorbati, director of Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA), shared her work with the Transboundary Water In-Cooperation Network (TWIN) and their international cooperation to develop a new United Nations convention on conserving the river deltas (UNCCRD) with the Reporter Danielle M. Crosier of the Bennington Banner.
Nicholas Brooke, music faculty member at Bennington College, will bring his creative collaborators to MASS MoCA for a week-long residency culminating in a work-in-progress performance of his latest piece, Ten Transcendental Etudes, on March 1-2. The show will also run at HERE performing arts center in New York City April 4-7.
Bennington College science faculty member Tim Schroeder co-authored a journal article, “Mineral Carbonation of Peridotite Fueled by Magmatic Degassing and Melt Impregnation in an Oceanic Transform Fault,” that was published in the most recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Computer Scientist Darcy Otto studies the foundations of computation, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and AI ethics and is starting as a new faculty member in the spring term. He is eager to help students discover how to think like computer scientists and how deep questions connect seemingly disparate areas of study.
By Craig Morgan Teicher
Ten amazing writers have recently joined the Writing Seminars faculty, and we’re thrilled to introduce them. We asked them to tell us about the last thing they wrote, among other things. Read their answers, as well as some brilliant first sentences from their books and essays.
The latest additions to Bennington’s rich literary history have hit bookstore shelves. Their authors join Bennington notables, including Donna Tartt '86, Kiran Desai '93, Michael Pollan '76, Ann Goldstein '71, Anaïs Duplan '14, Anne Waldman '66, Cynthia Sweeney MFA '13, Jamie Quatro MFA '09, Amy Gerstler '01, Morgan Jerkins MFA '16, and Charles Bock '97.
Bennington College was on the ground in Dubai as the 28th round of UN sponsored climate negotiations got underway.
At Bennington College, as many as half of the courses offered each term are new. Class offerings change with current events and evolve with faculty members’ research interests. While this method is extraordinary regardless of discipline, it is a particularly unusual way to teach Cultural Studies and Languages, compared to methods used at other colleges and universities.
Bennington College congratulates Bruna Dantas Lobato ’15 who won the National Book Award for her translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain in a ceremony on the evening of Wednesday, November 15.
By Craig Morgan Teicher
Hugh Ryan graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2009 and went on to publish two acclaimed books of nonfiction, When Brooklyn Was Queer (2019) and The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which won the Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction and the Warren Johansson Award. He has taught nonfiction at the Writing Seminars since 2022, and just sold his next book, Becoming History, a memoir in essays. He talked with me about turning research into writing and falling back in love with the essay.
Coming to work at Bennington College is nothing new to new sculpture faculty John Umphlett; he has been a technical instructor in sculpture here for more than 20 years.
Bennington College Drama Faculty Sherry Kramer released a new book, Writing for Stage and Screen: Creating a Perception Shift in the Audience, published by Methuen/Bloomsbury (UK) last month. We caught up with her to learn more.
Bennington College faculty are encouraged to follow their own interests and the interests of their students as they propose their classes. As a result, classes, as many as half of which are new each term, feature topics that are always reflecting new lines of inquiry.
Virginia Kelsey is a mezzo-soprano trained in the Western classical tradition and an original member of the Grammy© Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, an alternative-classical vocal band.
Experts on Iranian culture and politics blur the lines between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Bennington College is proud to announce that long-time visiting faculty member Maboula Soumahoro will join scholars from around the world for a year-long fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris starting this fall.
Bennington College Film-Video faculty member Mariam Ghani and Choreographer Liz Lerman ’69 are recipients of the prestigious 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. They are among more than 100 Bennington-associated Guggenheim Fellows to have been awarded throughout both organizations’ histories.
Winston Foundation Grant funds Spring 2023 class and reading Wednesday, May 17
Through a thought-provoking Q & A, Susan Sgorbati, the Director of Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA), reveals a refreshing philosophy and original means of working toward a better world. Interview by Chief Writer Ashley Jowett.
The director of Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA), Susan Sgorbati, will join Asim Zia, PhD, Director, the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security, Professor of Public Policy & Computer Science, Department of Community Development and Applied Economics & Department of Computer Science at the University of Vermont, and Oluowo Freeman of the African Centre for Climate Actions and Rural Development Initiative (ACCARD) and others to present an event at the 2023 United Nations (UN) Water Conference.